Friday, October 23, 2009

Tutorial: Photo Manipulation

Fun With Manipulation!

It's really fun to play manip. But lettuce not fool ourselves, some of the most hilarious photo manipulations ever weren't intended to be funny.

They were just really shitty.

The worst manip I've seen this week is this:

Yeah. That's just... really awful. His head is frightening, and I know Angel insists that ROB JUST HAS AN EPIC HEAD (which, he does, to an extent), but guess what? It shouldn't be eating Bella, kwim? It's just bad. The positioning isn't proportionate to his shoulders and body and ewwww. Seriously, Summit, I need a fucking job and you need a fucking graphics designer. Call me.

Also, anyone else wondering why they're using a crescent moon all over NEW MOON? I mean, fucking hale, symbolism, people, get with it. Makes no sense to me, but idk... I digress...

Lettuce Talk Picture Hunting

If you plan to give manipulation a try, you'd be better be prepared to scour the internet high and low for the right pictures to use. For your base image, you want to find something high quality that won't get you sued. I personally frequent stock websites like sxc.hu or deviantArt.com's stock image section.

OR...

I look for jean ads. Yeah, I know, but if you think about it, the models are already positioned for hotness, the lighting is always great, they are always really kinda artsy, and they're ADS. They're already public and even though I'm certain some copyrighting exists, you won't see Levi's emailing you anytime soon to request the image be removed. They have better things to do. Like find really anorexic bitches to hump all up on some ripped dudes.

Another option is using movie promos, photoshoots of other actors, or bands, or just... fuck. Get creative. Anything labeled "PROMO" is copyright flimsy. They want you to promo their shit anyway.

For this tutorial, I'm using the below Levi's image. It was chosen from a Twitter poll.

So, a little angsty E/B, yes?

Now we need to choose two corresponding images of Rob/Kstew to make this work.

The most important thing to remember about photo manipulation is this: The more work you have to do to make it look natural, the more unnatural it'll be. It doesn't matter how long you tweak and work to make it perfect, if you HAVE to keep tweaking, then it's all wrong.

Consider these.

1. Position.

This is obviously important. Is the model looking down or up? Left or right? Consider perspective and depth and how that will relate to your Rob or Kstew.

Here's a really shitty and quick sketch I did to convey position and depth. We need to find poses from our Rob and Kstew that mimic this, as much as possible. You can rotate a head to a certain degree, but if you do it too much, you get this:

Now, at first sight, we don't know what's wrong with this, we just know it's kinda... off. Well, look at their hair. It has no gravity. Hair always falls toward the ground, unless it's styled otherwise. In this case, Bella and Edward were obviously taken from a picture of them standing. This is a nice photo, but that one thing ruined it. Well, that and the fact that the lighting is emanating from between their faces and not ambient but... that's next...

2. Lighting.

Nothing gives away a manipulation like lighting deviation, Sure, you can tweak a little, but the big shit matters. Consider where the light source is coming from and how bright it is, like the below examples illustrate.

So we see where the light source is coming from in these. They are fairly direct.

Fortunately, I have chosen a photo with more ambient, outdoor lighting. These are the easiest because, for one, most studio photoshoots do the ambient dealy. They're big on lighting. So more of the Rob/Kstew pics you find will be in this range.

3. Size.

Size does matter. You can't blow a picture up. Making it larger ruins the quality. So always get the biggest possible images when hunting. You can shrink later, if necessary.

The images that I chose to best suit the above base image are these.

These fit my parameters nicely! Now we just need to move them over to the base.

Step Lists Are Fun

Yeah, I'm using Adobe Photoshop for this. Sorry for all of you that don't/can't use it!

Click on the "Step" link to see a diagram of my Adobe panel for that step.

Cut out Rob. We're doing him first (that's what she said), so we want to whip out our path tool (diagram) and start clicking around the parts of his head that we need (that's what she said). We won't need the hair cut out because the backgrounds are both conveniently white (I swear, I totally didn't plan that).

Putting Rob in His Place. We're going to lower the opacity on Rob's head to 50%, so we can still see the image below him. Then, we're going to use our "Move Tool" to position him correctly. Click the option to "Show Bounding Box" to rotate and shrink the image if necessary. In this case, it is.

Add Shadows. Get out your "Burn Tool" and choose a soft round brush (I used 69px because it makes me giggle) and, being certain your Rob Head is selected and NOT your layer mask still, burn the edges of his jaw like so (diagram). Really consider where shadows would naturally fall given surroundings. Here, her head is an obvious shadow producer.

Kstew's hair isn't as big at the top as our base model's. We must get rid of the base model's hair by clicking off visibility for kstew, making a new layer, and using the color picker to determine what our background color should be. In this case, it's just white, and rather easy. In other pieces, you may need to use the clone tool instead of painting. For this, we're just painting white over the model's hair.

Yeah, so I made the head a little bigger because once it's on the body, we can use our eyes to guage how natural it looks. A good tip at this point is to flip your entire canvas horizontally. Sometimes you'll stare at it too long and grow comfortable with things that should look uncomfortable. It's an opposing view to the same image. I just tweaked the size a bit.

I just don't like her hair. It's all flat and BLAH. I want more hair! Big hair! But how we just get more hair? Simple. Duplicate the head layer, select the bottom-most head layer in the palette, and move it around a little. Since it's behind the actual head layer, you'll see the edges of her hair peek out when you move it. I moved it up a little, and to the right. It gives her a nice little... crown bob... thingy... whateverthefuck they're called. I repeated this again with the hair at her neck.

That's about it, folks. Now you have a good manipulation.

What are you going to do with it?

Well, you can add some color, firstly, it's okay. I like to apply actions to mine because I'm lazy in that way.

Step 23. Go to "Layer >> Flatten Image" to flatten this to one layer. Then, with that layer selected, choose an action from the list of your spanking new pretties collection (I chose "Broken Camera"), and press the "Play" button.

ZOMG WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Psh.

Magic and stuff.

Now you can crop this out for a pretty banner, add some text and a border and maybe a nice bokeh texture, and viola! You're a manipulator.

And you didn't even have to sparkle...

Fault is an UHMAZING new AH E/B fic. Please to be checking it out and showing the awesome author some awesome love for her awesome shit? Thanks.

WOW, just WOW!!! To be honest I never can tell manipulations unless I have the faults shown to me in detail (even then I sometimes don't see it.) You've obviously got a great eye for this sort of thing. Also agree with sobriquetqueen, I've kinda always wanted to play around with manipulations myself, but haven't had a clue. So thanks for the post bb :)

Okay, I saw Angel rec Fault last night on Twitter and it is definately on my list to read, sooner rather than later.However, your comments about the work of Summit made me laugh. I never took a good hard look at the pic before, but you are so right, it is shit. Good work on the banner for Fault! Excellent job!

Great! Thank you for this, I learned some new nifty things. I think Kirsten looks a little unnatural, though, with her head just a little bit too large and a little bit of the first pic's chin peeking underneath the second. Plus some levels would have done her good.

As for the new moon image, Rob's head doesn't bother me quite so much as that GARGANTUAN claw hand groping Kristen's back. Must go look at other pictures to compare the size of his hands in RL but I swear that just looks unnatural.

Your comments about Summit got me all stirred up again. I was incensed when I saw the ABYSMAL job they did with EVERY poster of Edward and Bella. Seriously, WTF?!

In fact, I was so irritated at what SHOULD have been a great poster, I spent a whole day tearing it apart in photoshop and rebuilding it. I'd love for you to check it out and let me know if you see anything else I should have done... http://captivated2.livejournal.com/3289.html

(I have Wide Awake illustration there too, but I think you've seen most of them.)

Omg, I love your tutorials. And your qualms against the New Moon poster made me laugh, mostly because they're so true! I'm looking into graphic design as a field; is it really hard to find work right now? Can't wait for your next tutorial!

AG I'm so glad you're still doing these articles. I love them. I'm a PS3 user, but my ability is limited....but growing every time you post one of these. Workshops are expensive...thank you for doing this in your fee time

Really enjoy your series. Thank you. I downloaded GIMP months ago upon your recommendation and have just started working with it. I've found some of the youtube.com video tutorials to be helpful, although many are kind of crappy so you have to dig. Do you know of a good video tutorial series? It doesn't necessarily need to be free, just effective in communication style. There are a few out there that I've seen, I just thought you might know.

The writers of this blog and their guest's choose the stories they wish to showcase based on their own criteria and within certain preset guidelines. While they know that there are many wonderful stories, they look for a wide variety of styles within the fandom to feature. It is their general consensus to reach far into the community to find new, quality stories for you to read. Unfortunately, at this time, we are unable to take recommendation requests.

Disclaimer: This blog is meant to enhance the Twilighted Community, NOT take away from it. We will encourage story and forum posting on Twilighted and will rec only fics that fall under the guidelines of Twilighted. This is your newsletter to help you navigate the world of Twilight fandom and the Twilighted Community, because that's what we're about....enhancing the Twilighted Community in the most positive way we can!

All stories and characters that fall under the Twilight Universe and the rights to said universe are owned by Stephanie Meyer. No copyright infringement is intended.